Anxiety-addled auteur Ari Aster strays even further from his horror foundations with Eddington, a satirical contemporary Western set during the heat of the covid pandemic in May of 2020. For a filmmaker who’s never shied away from provocation, his latest epic may be his most superficially provocative to date but the attempt to instigate this time around feels markedly impersonal and hollow. Going into this movie, I certainly wasn’t expecting Aster to have a panacea for our perpetually divided country but I was at least hoping he’d have some nuance within his lockdown-era lectures. What I found instead were cartoon characters and soft targets from a filmmaker uninterested in giving voice to the majority in the middle and choosing instead to give even more attention to the loudest mouthpieces on either end of the political spectrum.
Reuniting with Aster from the 2023 tragicomedy Beau Is Afraid, Joaquin Phoenix stars as Joe Cross, the in-over-his-head sheriff of the fictional town in New Mexico that gives the film its name. Since the outbreak of the coronavirus, their mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal) has enforced a masked mandate that has been embraced by some in town but ruffled the feathers of others. Cross is decidedly in the latter camp and after a showdown with Garcia at the supermarket, Cross spontaneously announces a bid to challenge him in the upcoming mayoral race. The announcement comes as a shock to Cross’ wife Louise (Emma Stone) and her mother Dawn (Deirdre O’Connell), who’s been living with the Crosses since the beginning of the year. As Joe ramps up his campaign, tensions within the community rise amid growing social and political movements that the sheriff and his office attempt to stave off.
If Aster wanted to make a more biting satire of American life, he could have filled Eddington with characters that at least have degrees of subtlety and more closely resemble how real people struggled in the early days of covid. But there’s very little shading in the way that the citizens of Eddington are rendered across two and a half hours, even though time certainly allows for more characterization. We spend the majority of the runtime with Phoenix, obviously a tremendous actor stuck mumbling through one of his least compelling roles to date. From go, Joe Cross is a blowhard and a dunderhead, even though he’s nominally the film’s protagonist. Perhaps by design, it’s difficult to root for anyone in Eddington but as Cross’ political strategy veers into overtly criminal activity, he becomes even less sympathetic.
On the periphery, storylines about conspiracy theorists and social justice warriors come and go as Aster takes drive-by pot shots as members of both groups. Austin Butler turns up as a cultish life coach seizing the instability of the moment to indoctrinate folks into his grift but he barely sticks around long enough to make much of an impression. Character actor Clifton Collins Jr. pops in as an incoherent vagrant resembling the hostile drifters that attacked Beau outside his apartment building in Beau Is Afraid. I realize Aster seems to be terrified by a lot of things but the way he depicts homeless people as perpetually dangerous and violent in his movies makes it seem like he especially has issues with that particular demographic. Only Micheal Ward, portraying a trainee in the sheriff’s office, registers as an actual person capable of thoughtfulness and acuity before the plot dictates he be shuffled around the chessboard.
If Aster wants to make a divisive movie about divisive times, I have no problem with Eddington carrying a prevalently pessimistic tone but if you’re going to be this cynical about human nature, you have to be smart about it too. From time to time, we’ll get glimpses of the social media echo chambers being fed to our characters through their phones and we can glean insight as to why everyone is so fractured and unwilling to trust one another. But when the characters put their devices away and outwardly express themselves, it almost always goes to the most obvious point of caricature. Aster has stated that he wrote Eddington while “living in hell” doomscrolling during lockdown and the results certainly point to someone terminally online trying and failing to make sense of their feelings. Had he baked sourdough bread or gone for a walk instead, perhaps we would’ve gotten a worthwhile movie out of it.
Score – 1.5/5
New movies coming this weekend:
Coming to theaters is The Fantastic Four: First Steps, a superhero film starring Pedro Pascal and Vanessa Kirby, involving a quartet of astronauts-turned-superheroes as they protect the Earth from a planet-devouring cosmic being and his herald.
Also playing only in theaters is Oh, Hi!, a romantic dramedy starring Molly Gordon and Logan Lerman, following a young couple in the midst of a situationship on their first romantic weekend getaway as it goes awry in a most unexpected way.
Premiering on Netflix is Happy Gilmore 2, a sports comedy sequel starring Adam Sandler and Julie Bowen, bringing back the titular golfer as he comes out of retirement 30 years after winning his first Tour Championship so he can pay for his daughter’s ballet school.
Reprinted by permission of Whatzup